Mon Dec 10 2012 10:37Notes On (My) Fiction:
Yesterday I finished a draft of a second story in the universe of "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" (working title: "Grand Theft Carnosaur"). It needs some work, but that's what writing group is for. I'm cautiously optimistic. While working on the story I got a concept for a third story in that universe, so maybe I can make it a trilogy. No, a cycle! A motor-cycle.

"Dinosaurs" got a lot of links when it was published, but no actual reviews, so I was surprised to find two reviews of "Four Kinds of Cargo". First, from Locus: "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a heartwarming note." You could review almost any piece of my fiction as "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a ________ note."

“Four Kinds of Cargo” is a science fiction story about science fiction characters basing their lives around a science fiction story and its characters. It’s metafiction in a neat, innocuous disguise... Its major drawback is an unavoidable one – the prose simply isn’t very good. But to succeed as the kind of multi-referential system it sets out to be, I don’t think this story could have been written in any other way. The cleverness of the premise and the recognition of what’s been pulled off both explain (if not demand) and make up for the lacklustre prose. This one made me want to grimace as I started reading it; by the end I wanted to applaud.